The Post-Binge-Watching Blues: A Malady of Our Times

Bathed in the light of my laptop, green in its glow, I finished another episode of “Master of None,” Aziz Ansari’s Netflix comedy. It was after midnight, but not long after, and I reasoned that one more couldn’t hurt; the screen was already inclining in that direction, offering helpfully to auto-start the next episode in the queue.

That episode was the last of the 10-episode season, which had been delivered, like the majority of Netflix shows, in one giant drop. Watch one a week or 10 a night. It is as serial as you make it, a serve-yourself buffet with no recommended serving size and no waiting.

And it was about to be over.

I felt anxious, wistful, bereft in advance; I’d eaten up nine episodes in only a few days, liking them more than I’d expected to. Once finished, there’d be no more until the next season — if there was a next season, which has still not been officially announced. Unlike on network TV, where my fix would be parceled out week by week over the course a season, I had binged.

It turns out, I was not alone. Social media teemed with fellow sufferers.

“Think I have post-Netflix binge depression,” @_PhilippaRose posted on Twitter, with a weepy emoji.

“The struggle of having nothing left to binge watch is real,” @FicholasNoster wrote.

Some have wondered whether there is a term for this post-binge separation. Allow me to suggest one: We have, to tweak a term from the glum in winter, Unseasonal Affective Disorder: post-binge malaise.

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Aziz Ansari in “Master of None.”CreditK.C. Bailey/Netflix

It tweets nicely. “USAD, bro?” we can now ask one another.

And so we are.

“It leaves you with a feeling of emptiness,” said Danielle Butler, 30, one of the many who took to social media to vent. “You feel kind of ridiculous, but it’s a sense of abandonment.”

Ms. Butler works in communications for a Chicago-area hospital. Her binge of choice was “Jessica Jones,” Netflix’s new, much-debated Marvel series about a noirish private eye played by Krysten Ritter. Ms. Butler watched it over the course of a weekend.

“I started Friday evening,” she said. “By midday Saturday I was done. I don’t have any impulse control with that stuff. Once I’m there, I’m there.”

Netflix is well aware that binge-watching, though not the norm, is a modern phenomenon. The company keeps careful watch on its user analytics, and though it mostly keeps its findings to itself, Netflix released data from a commissioned survey in 2013 that 61 percent of respondents binge-watch (which it defined as watching at least two episodes in a row) regularly. Though the survey has not been repeated since, said Jenny McCabe, Netflix’s director of global media relations, “It’s not like binge-watching on Netflix has tapered off at all.” (Anecdotal as well as statistical evidence confirms that. “My mother wanted to know when the next season of ‘Longmire’ was coming out,” Ms. McCabe said.)

The company is also keenly aware that the post-binge malaise is real (if not anywhere near as terminal as the moaning on social media may suggest). A new Netflix video takes on the subject directly, introducing a heroine heartbroken to have finished her series. She has only Netflix’s enormous catalog to content her, and eventually decides to watch — spoiler alert — “Bloodline.”

Netflix did not invent binge-watching; it has existed since the days of “Law & Order” marathons on TV and DVD box sets. But when Netflix began creating original content in 2013 with “House of Cards,” and made the decision to release all episodes at once (as it had done with previous seasons of network and cable shows), a binge-watching boom was begun.

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Mindy Kaling in "The Mindy Project," which found a new home on Hulu for its fourth season.CreditGreg Gayne/Fox

“If you give people this opportunity to mainline all in one day, there’s reason to believe they will do it,” David Fincher, a director of “House of Cards,” told the Directors Guild of America in 2013, around the time of the show’s debut.

He was proved correct. “House of Cards” was much binged, and Netflix now tracks which episode of a show’s first season signifies a point of no return, after which 70 percent of viewers will watch the entire season. They call these data “hooked.” (For “House of Cards,” it was Episode 3.)

Not every provider believes in the single-bounty drop. As of last summer, Hulu, the online streaming service that also produces its own shows, adopted a weekly rollout for new episodes of its original series (including “The Mindy Project,” picked up from Fox, and “Difficult People”). Episodes, however, remain live on the site after they air so that users can watch up to the present and can effectively binge the entire season after its initial run.

“The vast majority of television over the vast majority of the history of television has been released weekly,” said Craig Erwich, Hulu’s senior vice president, head of content. “To the extent that television has always been and is increasingly a communal and social activity, that is a key part of the enjoyment.”

Historically, Monday morning quarterbacking the latest episode of “The Sopranos” or “Sex and the City” (or, for an earlier generation, Wednesday-morning recaps of “thirtysomething”) has been one of the pleasures of TV fandom. Hulu, Mr. Erwich said, aims to preserve “that water-cooler sense of community, giving people time in between episodes to interact with other people about it, everybody being able to watch it at the same time.” Hulu’s rollout strategy, he said, is “a testament to a great tradition.”

Traditions, of course, change with time.

“I haven’t laid eyes on a water cooler since I was in elementary school,” said Beau Willimon, the showrunner and executive producer of “House of Cards.”

A new tradition is emerging, to complement, if not replace, the old one: the out-of-shows blues, the keen of USAD sufferers everywhere. Mr. Willimon, who takes a sunny view of fans’ ability to binge or slow-drip, according to their preferences, has observed it firsthand.

“Certainly there are people all the time who are tweeting at me and saying ‘I can’t wait until the next season’ or ‘How long do we have to wait?’ ” Mr. Willimon said, speaking from the Baltimore set of the show’s fourth season, to debut in 2016. “I think if they had their druthers, we’d be able to pump them out faster than a year at a time.”

He admitted that this anticipation puts responsibility on creators to deliver. It’s a mark of success: proof that a show has found an engaged audience and left it wanting more. But he emphasized that there’s plenty out there for a binger between seasons, not to mention the comfort of a newly minute community for complaint and commiseration, or “ad hoc online support groups,” as Mr. Willimon called them.

“If I’m a person who’s binged a season of ‘Master of None’ or ‘House of Cards’ or ‘Orange Is the New Black’ or what have you, there’s other people out there who have as well,” he said. “And we can all complain together that we have to wait so long.”

This is not the only silver lining.

“If anything, patience is a virtue,” Mr. Willimon said. “And we’re contributing to the virtue of all those fans out there.”

That, and the full second season of “Transparent” arrives on Amazon next week.